Few people can claim to have been collectors for more than 80 years.
August Mier, born in 1892, was one of them.

From the age of six,“Augie” collected archaeological artifacts in the Batavia
area as well as across the United States. According to his own estimates,
Mier collected more than 6,500 spear-and arrowheads. Among his favorite
areas for finding Native American artifacts were the farms that, in 1967,
became part of the national laboratory now known as Fermilab.

In March of 1978, Mier donated a part of his impressive collection — about
one hundred items — to Fermilab, where they’ve been on display for
most of the past 24 years.

According to Michael Wiant, curator of anthropology at the Illinois State
Museum, three quarters of the items of the Mier exhibit at Fermilab are from
what experts call the Archaic time period, spanning from 3,000 to 10,000
years ago.

“It looks like a lot of people were living here
[at what is now Fermilab] during that time,”
said Wiant during a lecture at Fermilab on
September 25.“These were small groups
of people staying for short periods of time.
Most likely, these people were heavily
engaged in hunting activities. I would suspect
that many of the main villages of these people were
closer to the [Fox and DuPage] river valleys.”

Wiant has explored Native American culture and history in Illinois for more
than 30 years. He has participated in several large-scale excavation projects,
most notably the Koster site near where the Illinois River meets the
Mississippi.

“Prairies are bad places to get a meal,” Wiant said.“We see sites that —
rather than being broadly distributed across Illinois’landscape — are
concentrated along waterways,around upland kettles and other locations.”

Archaeologists believe that the first Native
Americans came to the Midwest more than 12,000
years ago, with some evidence even hinting at a
15,000-year history. Taking a quick inspection of
the Mier collection, Wiant identified five pieces that
are perhaps more than 10,000 years old, dating
back to the Paleo-Indian time period. This makes
Fermilab one of only 400 sites in Illinois with
archaeological artifacts dating back to the earliest
time of Native American culture in the state.

Dating artifacts is the first step in unfolding the
history of humanity. Under the right circumstances,
artifacts get buried in different layers of soil —
as evident at the 35-foot-deep excavation of the
Koster site — with each layer providing information
on the age of an item.

The landscape on which Fermilab is located
doesn’t provide such clues. It has basically
remained unchanged for more than 10,000 years.
When the last glacier, perhaps more than 3,000
feet thick, melted away, it left behind the landscape
seen today.

For amateur archaeologists like Mier, this has
presented a tremendous opportunity. With little
digging, they have had access to artifacts from
many different time periods.

“If one looks at the Mier collection, one immediately
sees that there is a whole lot of time represented,
sort of compressed on this landscape,” explained
Wiant.“If a tool was dropped, it essentially laid
there in place. If something else was dropped there
later, it stayed there, too.”

Lacking geological markers, archaeologists and
anthropologists apply their knowledge of historical
developments and technological advances to
separate artifacts of different time periods from
each other. The change from spearhead to
arrowhead, for example, represents a big
technological leap in Native American history.

“About 500 years A.D. this technology moved
across this country with lightning speed from an
archaeological perspective,” Wiant explained.
“The nature of the conditions that led to this
invention is not clear to us. But once people
got wind of it, it spread from the east coast to
the west coast in just a few hundred years.”

Scientists are also aware that the shape of artifacts
is influenced by the person who made them, as
well as the tribe and culture a craftsperson lived in.
Most importantly, each artifact has a story to tell
about the people that used it.

“When [experts] look at a collection like this,
it is not a pristine collection,” said Wiant. “It’s a
collection that has been used, and it reflects use
over time. Each one of those pieces has a history.
We try to tell time, we try to tell something about
the technology, we try to tell something about the
group of people, the culture that was involved in
the manufacturing of these pieces and the use
of them. All of those things become part of the
formula of looking at a body of artifacts and trying
to draw conclusions about who lived here.”

The Late Prehistoric time period, ranging from
700 to 300 years ago, right before the arrival of
European settlers, seems to be underrepresented
in the Mier collection. Wiant, however, attributed
this fact to Mier’s preference for collecting
arrowheads rather than broken pieces of pottery,
which are almost absent from the Fermilab exhibit.

Archaeological studies, initiated by Fermilab’s
first director Robert Wilson, support this view.
In the early 1970s, when construction of the first
accelerators at Fermilab was already underway,
archaeologist Ann Early and a group of students
from Northwestern University carried out
systematic studies of five prehistoric Indian
campsites that had been discovered during survey
work. Keeping track of every tiny fragment, the
excavations revealed a much stronger presence
of Native American life on the Fermilab site than
indicated by the Mier collection alone.

“Results of the survey conducted during 1970
clearly indicated that the National Accelerator
Laboratory property had, on several occasions,
been used as a hunting and camping ground for
a variety of prehistoric Indian groups,” Early wrote
in her report.“The Bartelt site [a farm located in the
northwest corner of the lab] had been occupied by
four different groups of people over a period of
perhaps 8,500 years.”

Examining artifacts such as arrowheads is only one
aspect of archaeology. To learn about agricultural
methods, for example, scientists not only look for
prehistoric tools but also seeds that were used.
Dating those small objects requires modern
analysis tools, some of which are based on
technology used by particle physicists.

“Accelerator methodology has now been applied
in anthropology and archaeology,” Wiant said.
“It has revolutionized how we tell time. Prior to this,
using standard radiometric assay, it would require
something like nine grams of charcoal to be able to
get a date with a standard error of something like
a hundred years. Using accelerator methodology,
we can take tiny pieces of charcoal and assay the
radiocarbon fraction of them and get ideas about
dating. We actually can pick up a seed and date
the seed to give us ideas about the origins of
agriculture.”

Using accelerator technology, scientists have
dated the introduction of corn to the Midwest at
about 600 years A.D. Two hundred years later,
Native Americans planted the first beans in Illinois.
These new sources of food, which could be stored
for consumption during the winter, led to the
development of larger villages with populations
of about one thousand people.

The most profound change in Native American life,
however, began in 1673, when French settlers
arrived in Illinois. Less than 175 years later,
government agents forcibly removed the last
members of the Potowatomi tribe from the state.
Today, Native Americans again call Illinois home.
In the Chicago community alone, there are about
ten thousand people from a variety of different
tribes, representing the broad heritage of Native
American people.

“There is a remarkable record of human history,”
Wiant concluded his lecture at Fermilab.“A part
of the story is told right here on this landscape.”

Due to the renovation of the exhibit area on the 15th floor of
Fermilab ’s Wilson Hall,the Mier collection has been in storage since
2001.Fermilab officials plan to make the collection available to the
public again by the end of 2003.Recognizing the value of cultural
resources on the site,Fermilab and the Department of Energy have
prepared a Cultural Resources Management Plan to direct the
handling of discoveries such as the Mier artifacts.They are to
be administered in a spirit of stewardship for future generations,
in accordance with the National Historic Preservation Act.